The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty: A Novel - Couverture rigide

“[Vendela Vida’s] finest book...With its echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith, this novel is full of darting pleasures.” (New York Times)

“A brilliant inquiry into the eternal mysteries of being... Told cinematically in one long, bewitching take, Vida’s astutely insightful, keenly suspenseful, surreptitiously metaphysical novel demands to be read in a breath-held trance and then plunged into again.” (Booklist (starred review))

“Vendela Vida’s work is utterly compelling, surprising, economical, lush, beautifully written. Reading her inspires me, and reminds me of how powerful the novel can be - how addictive and vital - and of how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as her comes along.” (George Saunders)

“Like Bowles’ despairing, existential “The Sheltering Sky,” Vida’s novel penetrates the psyche of an American traveler when confronted with an alien culture and landscape.... [A]n emotionally precise and absorbing meditation on how grief can divest us of our most fundamental sense of self.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“Every woman writing literary thrillers gets compared to Patricia Highsmith once if she’s lucky, but this is one of the few times it’s felt to me like a hopeful comparison. After this, I’ll read anything Vida writes.” (Chicago Tribune)

“Vendela Vida has written a truly original novel, a work of art that shines with Buñuelian play and cruelty. The situation is discomfiting and addictive. You will be driven to read this novel compulsively, and then you will have the same strange sly smile that I do, now.” (Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers)

“Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It’s also insanely funny.)” (Lena Dunham)

“Smart, thoroughly engrossing, funny, and even a bit disturbing. ... Part mystery/thriller and part absurdist/postmodern novel with a feminist slant, it is simultaneously funny and serious.” (New York Journal of Books)

“You will tear through Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, this wry, edgy, philosophical thriller, this love child of Albert Camus and Patricia Highsmith, this sly satire of Hollywood, this entertaining journey through the vast desert of identity and regret.” (Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins )

“Unequivocally a thriller, but more movingly, a meditation on identity.” (Vanity Fair)

From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.

In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities—she knows she’ll never recover her possessions. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.

A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she’s inhabiting the actress’s skin off set, too—going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving further and further away from the person she once was.

Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.